Contents

XML Security Tools

Background

XML is available more or less everywhere nowadays. As configuration files, for data exchange, in XML enabled databases, web services and many more. And a lot of these applications and services do not secure their XML documents: neither encryption nor digital signatures are applied. Or standard transport security like https is used. This destroys the advantages of XML and prevents parsing.

Using XML Security to secure XML based information provides many advantages: the XML structure of the XML document remains intact, independent of the applied signature or encryption (or both). Arbitrary elements or element content can be secured, with different keys if desired. XML Security provides end-to-end-security, applying security directly to the message (information), not to the transport.

The XML Security Tools are a set of plug-ins, which enable users and developers to easily canonicalize, sign, verify, encrypt and decrypt arbitrary XML documents in different editors. The aim is to support as many XML editors as possible (with a preference on the WTP XML Editor) from which one can call all available XML Security wizards/ tools. The goal of the project is to provide an easy to use possibility to secure various XML documents in various editors (or via extension points). Its intention is to spread the use of XML Security and to show users the power of the W3C recommendations.

All XML security functionality is based on the Apache XML Security project Santuario. No further cryptographic software or library is required.

The Eclipse XML Security Tools are based on a contribution from the XML-Security Plug-In project, originally created by Dominik Schadow and hosted at SourceForge. Dominik has contributed that code base to Eclipse as of September 2008. All code is licensed under the Eclipse Public License.

Download

The latest released version of the XML Security Tools plug-ins and features can be found at: